1. Field of Use
This invention relates to photoplotter equipment and more particularily to techniques for loading and unloading photographic media from such equipment.
2. Prior Art
It has been found that generally the production of artwork is limited to manually processing one or possibly two finished pieces of artwork during a single day. The processing operation normally involves the manual loading of a single sheet of unexposed artwork film in a dark room environment onto the artwork generating photoplotter equipment. A period of six or seven hours is generally required for generating the completed artwork which corresponds to a printed wiring plot for one layer of a printed wiring board. Each such board normally contains from six to twelve layers.
When the photoplotting equipment has processed a piece of artwork film, an operator removes the finished artwork film and then loads a second piece of film onto the photoplotter equipment. At the beginning of the second day or shift, the second artwork film is removed by the operator.
It can be seen from the above that this process is quite time consuming and requires operator intervention.
It is a primary object of the present invention to provide a mechanism or device which can be attached to existing photoplotter equipment without modification and permit such equipment to continously process sheets of artwork film without manual intervention.
It is a further object to provide a fully automatic film loading and unloading mechanism which can be used in conjunction with existing artwork photoplotting equipment.